How two IITians founded 'BenchPrep' to make GMAT more fun to crack

"Whether it's a free lecture from MIT or a paid practice test from Princeton, BenchPrep provides a place for the content to come alive" says Gupta.

By Niharika Mookerjee

Global India Newswire

When IIT-Mumbai graduate Ashish Rangnekar was preparing for GMAT four years ago, he found it very frustrating and boring, especially the lack of interactivity.

"The only way to crack a standardised test like the GMAT was to pay through your nose for a special class or to lug around a huge book," says his friend Ujjwal Gupta, also from IIT-Mumbai.

The two began to brainstorm on "how could this process work better?" and make it more interactive. Two years and thousands of hours of tech crunching later, an education technology and custom teaching startup was born.

Last Wednesday, Gupta was among the select few - honchos of eight institutes in total - chosen to meet the new secretary for education, Arne Duncan, in Washington DC, as the new administration goes about its job to formulate a new educational policy.

BenchPrep, founded by Gupta and Rangnekar, builds apps for smartphones, tablets and other devices, and delivers content from its partners, among them leading publishing industry players such as McGraw Hill, Cengage Learning and Wiley, across platforms in an interactive manner. "Whether it's a free lecture from MIT or a paid practice test from Princeton Review, BenchPrep provides a place for the content to come alive for the user," says Gupta.

"A student looking for Algebra help will have a range of courses to choose from a variety of publishers, all in one place." Today, the Chicago-based firm has a user base of 300,000, four-fifths of them in the US.

Interactivity is one of the key aspects of the firm's teaching method. "It follows a student's performance on certain questions and exams, and customises the course based on that analysis," says Gupta.

"The course is tailored to the student's strengths and weaknesses and to what he or she has identified as the end goal." BenchPrep also tells students how much time they spent taking a chapter test, which problems they got wrong, and which reading sections they needed to improve upon. In other words, after collecting all usage data, it personalises a study schedule based on students' strengths and weaknesses. For less than $300 a year, BenchPrep offers more than 200 courses.

The company's goal is to make available a thousand courses by the end of this year. So far, BenchPrep has had great success in attracting investments. Last summer, it got $6 million in venture funding. In 2011, in the first round of funding, it had raised $2.2 million.

Gupta believes digital delivery will increasingly become part of the education in future. He says, "Content is no longer shackled to traditional methods of delivery; there is a plethora of amazing content out there. The true bottleneck is the capacity to deliver it in the best way possible." Gupta, who leads BenchPrep's marketing, product and project management initiatives, also spells out the company's long-term goals.

"We want to be the first global interactive library with a value proposition that it is a no-brainer for anyone to subscribe to," he says. "Education sector is one of the very few sectors that need a lot of help for technological advancement, and investors can see that." Gupta compares studying on Bench-Prep with shopping on Amazon. He says: "[instead of] running around a mall from store to store, you can find everything in one place.

This provides additional advantages to the student." Gupta, who has a PhD in chemistry from The Pennsylvania State University, says the BenchPrep method has been found very successful and cost-efficient. "We have seen an average increase of 18% in students' scores when they complete more than 80% of a BenchPrep course in less than three months," he says. "If you add the cost to it and compare it with our competitors, we are providing almost 10 times the value for every dollar spent."